were the work of evil-doers who entered by the skylights to
steal valuable and precious volumes. But he found no traces of burglary,
and, notwithstanding the most minute search, failed to discover that
anything had disappeared. Terrible anxiety took possession of his mind,
and he fell to wondering whether it was possible that some monkey in the
neighbourhood came down the chimney and acted the part of a person
engaged in study. Deriving his knowledge of the habits of these animals
in the main from the paintings of Watteau and Chardin, he took it that,
in the art of imitating gestures or assuming characters they resembled
Harlequin, Scaramouch, Zerlin, and the Doctors of the Italian comedy; he
imagined them handling a palette and brushes, pounding drugs in a
mortar, or turning over the leaves of an old treatise on alchemy beside
an athanor. And so it was that, when, on one unhappy morning, he saw a
huge blot of ink on one of the leaves of the third volume of the
polyglot Bible bound in blue morocco and adorned with the arms of the
Comte de Mirabeau, he had no doubt that a monkey was the author of the
evil deed. The monkey had been pretending to take notes and had upset
the inkpot. It must be a monkey belonging to a learned professor.

Imbued with this idea, Monsieur Sariette carefully studied the
topography of the district, so as to draw a cordon round the group of
houses amid which the d'Esparvieu house stood. Then he visited the four
surrounding streets, asking at every door if there was a monkey in the
house. He interrogated porters and their wives, washer-women, servants,
a cobbler, a greengrocer, a glazier, clerks in bookshops, a priest, a
bookbinder, two guardians of the peace, children, thus testing the
diversity of character and variety of temper in one and the same people;
for the replies he received were quite dissimilar in nature; some were
rough, some were gentle; there were the coarse and the polished, the
simple and the ironical, the prolix and the abrupt, the brief and even
the silent. But of the animal he sought he had had neither sight nor
sound, when under the archway of an old house in the Rue Servandoni, a
small freckled, red-haired girl who looked after the door, made reply:

"There is Monsieur Ordonneau's monkey; would you care to see it?"

And without another word she conducted the old man to a stable at the
other end of the yard. There on some rank straw and old bits of cloth, a
young macaco with